What you can do with an electric Volkswagen bus

The Shapiro brothers Gefen and Yona, who are nineteen and sixteen years old and resemble Harpo Marx, own eleven cars between them, including a Girl Scout green 1972 MG Midget, a blueberry blue 1987 Alfa Romeo Spider, and a 1926 Chevy truck that’s called Superior (and it’s the only one they haven’t gotten working yet). Gefen has five, Yona has two, and they share four. They usually buy wrecks on Facebook Marketplace or find them in people’s driveways. Gefen’s favorite is his 1972 Saab Sonett, a tangerine-colored coupe whose engine – half wild, half pathetic – roars like a dying lion. He also has a 1980 Fiat Spider convertible with a broken starter motor that he and one of my children found in a field in Vermont. Sometimes Gefen keeps his dwarf in my driveway. Last week we went to drag racing. Gefen drove the Sonett, Yona drove a shotgun and I drove the Volkswagen ID 2025. Buzz, two-tone, lemon yellow.

Volkswagen bus fans like me have been waiting for this thing – the plug-in electric buzz – for a quarter of a century. VW first announced a new edition of the bus in 2001, three years after the introduction of the relaunched Beetle. The VW electric bus finally hit the market in Europe in 2022, and I wrote a long article about it for the magazine. Now that a slightly larger version is coming to market in the US, Volkswagen sent me one for a week-long test drive.

I discussed the situation with Gefen. I don’t know how to write a car review, but I’ve been watching a lot of “Top Gear,” so Gefen and I brainstormed what possible “Top Gear”-style stunts I could do with my Buzz – a limited number of possibilities, considering that Jeremy Clarkson and I are made of different materials. We decided that we should pit my Buzz against his Sonnet, even though my Buzz has two hundred and eighty-two horsepower and his Sonnet has sixty-five, and my Buzz can go from zero to sixty in about six seconds, while his Sonnet admits he has “the sixty.” can’t reach.”

Gefen paid $2,900 for his Sonett about a year ago, then rebuilt the engine and replaced the clutch. The VW ID. Buzz starts at around $60,000, but if you want the sunroof and all-wheel drive or something special, you’ll get to over $70,000 pretty quickly. That’s an insane amount of money to spend on a car, especially if you’re into junkyard clunkers. When I was Yona’s age, I helped my brother Jack repair dented, rusted wrecks he found in classified ads. We moved the ping pong table and converted our garage into an auto body shop. Jack dressed up and shot a 1967 Camaro (“which I wish I still had,” he says), a 1968 Mustang, a 1967 Chevelle convertible, a 1973 Gremlin and a 1976 Hornet. In contrast To Yona, who is much smarter than me, I didn’t own any of these cars or even part of them, not even a hubcap. But I loved her. I particularly liked using the rivet gun. Ftt-fffffttttt.

I bought my first car, a used VW Golf, in 1989 for about what Gefen paid for his Sonett. It had a lot of it Driving pleasureVW’s cleverest advertising measure at the time. One of my sisters worked at a car dealer and got me one Driving pleasure Sticker I put on one of the blank spaces on my dashboard so I could walk in Driving pleasure Mode. I had the car for two weeks before totaling it, but until that accident it was a blast. Since then I have mainly driven VW buses, including two Vanagons. Our last one, a 2002 Eurovan, passed away this summer and we donated it to Kars4Kids. This September we didn’t have a VW bus for the first time in thirty years. And then one day this month, the new bus rolled into our driveway as if it belonged there, like a long-lost cat showing up at the kitchen door one sunny morning.

Honestly, I didn’t expect Buzz to be fun. Electric vehicles are a burden. Normally you can’t change. You’re barely allowed to steer. But it turns out the buzz is a journey. It’s like riding in a spaceship, but in a good way. I took Gefen with me. He said: “It’s just like your Eurovan, except it drives.”

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it for a week other than drive it around and give friends rides. I decided to go on a few little adventures with it. When our Vanagons and Eurovans were still running, we drove them to the Good News Garage, home of Tom and Ray Magliozzi, aka Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers who hosted NPR’s “Car Talk” for decades. (If NPR is interested in a reboot, I heard Gefen and Yona are available. . . .) Ray is still there, so I drove the buzz to the store.

“This is pretty neat,” Ray said, browsing through the three rows of seats. We got in.

“Your chair can give you a massage,” I offered as we set off. He rolled his eyes.

“Do you think people will buy it?” I asked.

“Not for sixty-five thousand dollars,” he said. He likes the old buses, “’68, ’69, ’70, ’72, after that they started to get annoying.”

We opened it on Memorial Drive. “But this thing flies,” he said, somewhat reluctantly.

Next I drove to Boston Volkswagen where the manager told me he hoped to get 48 Buzzes from VW. He figures he could sell hundreds, but VW won’t provide more than the dealership. I later had to take the Buzz back there to the service counter because one of the sliding doors got stuck – wide open – while I was out for a spin on a very cold day with a friend who is an environmental law professor. “We’re in ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ now,” I yelled as the wind rushed in. We were freezing. He suggested a new VW motto: “Our electric van brings you closer to the great outdoors, whether you want it or not.”

I wanted to take a road trip to test the range – four-thirty, two-thirty, not enough – so I decided to take the Buzz to John’s Car Corner in Westminster, Vermont, which is what it looks like from Route 5 a VW bus cemetery. 84-year-old John Hamill owned more than 2,700 cars. He bought his first Volkswagen in 1966 and named his first VW auto repair shop “People’s Car Company.” He currently drives three Vanagons. His favorite is a red model from 1990.

“Every day I wake up and think, today I get to drive my Vanagon and I’m happy,” he told me. He had never seen the buzz before. I took him with me. He didn’t mind that it closely resembled a Toyota Sienna. He could see the bus in its bones. While we were standing outside his shop, a lady came by and offered to buy it. This has happened many times. In parking lots, at taco stands, in the supermarket. Even now, when it’s still in my driveway, so there’s no room for Gefen’s dwarf, people come by, look at the buzz and knock on the door: “Do you want to sell this?”

To prepare for our drag race, Gefen and I watched the race in American Graffiti with Harrison Ford, who had a miniature human skull dangling from his rearview mirror.

“That’s so fire,” Gefen said.

Harrison Ford’s 1955 Chevy 150 veers off the road, rolls over and explodes.

“Uh, I don’t actually do that,” I said.

“I know,” Gefen said. “You’re such a baby.”

I wondered where we should race. Yona had an idea. “There’s this stretch of road where there are two lanes,” he said. “Out behind the synagogue?”

On the evening of the race we set off in a convoy. We had to drive through the synagogue parking lot and come out the other side to stand in line at the traffic lights. I had Yona on speakerphone.

“Why are there so many people here on a Tuesday evening?” Gefen asked, weaving through the parked cars.

“Hebrew school,” Yona said.

“Do you remember that time after Eli’s bar mitzvah when we were cramming about fourteen kids into the Eurovan after the dance party to drive everyone home and Momo thought he was going to throw up?” I asked.

“Yes,” Gefen said. “That was fire.”

We stopped side by side. Buzz, sonnet. Lemon and mandarin. Nobody behind us, nobody in front of us, nobody anywhere.

“I count three,” Yona said.

“Okay, yeah, but we’re only going about fifty meters, right?” I asked. “Because suddenly it’s kind of scary.”

“No, that’s so cool,” Yona said.

“And illegal?” I dared.

“Chicken,” Gefen said.

There are two lines on the Buzz’s brake, similar to a pause button. There is a small triangle on the accelerator: a play button.

Yona cleared her throat. “Three! Two! One!”

I smoked them. ♦